On Painting

Courses, March-June 1981

Gilles Deleuze author Charles J Stivale translator David Lapoujade editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Minnesota Press

Publishing:12th Aug '25

£120.00

This title is due to be published on 12th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This hardback is available in another edition too:

On Painting cover

Available for the first time in English: the complete and annotated transcripts of Deleuze’s 1981 seminars on painting

From 1970 until 1987, Gilles Deleuze held a weekly seminar at the Experimental University of Vincennes and, starting in 1980, at Saint-Denis. In the spring of 1981, he began a series of eight seminars on painting and its intersections with philosophy. The recorded sessions, newly transcribed and translated into English, are now available in their entirety for the first time. Extensively annotated by philosopher David Lapoujade, On Painting illuminates Deleuze’s thinking on artistic creation, significantly extending the lines of thought in his book Francis Bacon.

Through paintings and writing by Rembrandt, Delacroix, Turner, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Klee, Pollock, and Bacon, Deleuze explores the creative process, from chaos to the pictorial fact. The introduction and use of color feature prominently as Deleuze elaborates on artistic and philosophical concepts such as the diagram, modulation, code, and the digital and the analogical. Through this scrutiny, he raises a series of profound and stimulating questions for his students: How does a painter ward off grayness and attain color? What is a line without contour? Why paint at all?

Written and thought in a rhizomatic manner that is thoroughly Deleuzian—strange, powerful, and novel—On Painting traverses both the conception of art history and the possibility of color as a philosophical concept.

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"Gilles Deleuze’s lectures on painting explore catastrophe and its relation to the birth of color via a confrontation with prepictorial chaos based on the “diagram,” which generates different modulations of flesh and color. The result is a text that will have the same revolutionary impact on art history and studio practice that his two Cinema books have had on film studies." —Colin Gardner, University of California, Santa Barbara

ISBN: 9781517918392

Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 18mm

Weight: 510g

360 pages